The net result is that people who listen to police scanners — newshounds, journalists, community watchdogs, interested neighbors — can no longer hear police dispatches and communications in the Lehigh Valley’s largest city.

Perhaps this wouldn’t be so problematic if Allentown weren’t the Lehigh Valley’s most crime-addled municipality. Or if city officials had been more open in rolling out the changes.

Allentown Police Chief Roger MacLean said the city made the move and spent $1.1 million to improve officer safety and “operational security.”

He notes that law-abiding citizens, and plenty of them, aren’t the only ones listening to police radio frequencies. Bad guys do, too.

“With this new system the criminal element will not know where our officers are located,” he said. “It will also make it more difficult for them to try to judge how many officers are on duty at a given time.”

I’m all for enhancing safety for police officers, who day in and day out face scenarios most of us couldn't stomach. Protecting those who protect us must be a public agency’s highest priority. But this sure smells like a solution in search of a problem.

MacLean produced no evidence Allentown’s vermin were tracking officers’ whereabouts based off police radio frequencies. Some departments use encrypted radio systems for tactical units such as vice or SWAT squads, which makes sense.

But switching to a system that encrypts all transmissions, including day-to-day police response calls, leaves the impression city leaders are trying to hide crime.

That’s not a giant leap in a city that registered its eighth killing Friday as it pins its hopes on a downtown hockey arena and other economic development projects hoping to draw hundreds of thousands a year from outside of town.

It serves as another roadblock, especially in Pennsylvania, where citizens’ access to police records and information about what’s happening in their communities is severely limited by the lawmakers and governments that represent them.

There’s no denying the encryption hampers news-gathering; reporters have been monitoring police scanners as long as they’ve been in use. That spigot has been shut off.

I’m keen to the notion this comes off as sour grapes. But MacLean himself added fuel to the cynicism in the weeks leading up to the changeover when he pledged to work with news organizations concerned about restricted access. That hasn’t happened.

His assurances that police would work to develop a way to keep their communities informed have come up empty. We’re still waiting.

That’s a lot of McMuffins. And a lot of coin to find hidden in the city's sofa cushions.

I understand that the city is leveraging the $300,000, paid over three years, from the more than $2 million it expects to gain by a new 10-year agreement to keep the Crayola Experience in Centre Square.

And I understand that Crayola could have taken its attraction, now in its 16th year of bringing busloads Downtown, somewhere else.

But the timing of all of this has this commuter feeling like he's being taken for a ride.